argument. However, Cospatric bore upon his person better specimens than
I have ever seen before. He had sat to none but the most noted artists
of Burmah and Japan, and the outcome of their brushes--or, rather,
needles, as I suppose it should be termed--was in places more than
remarkable. Buddhas, nautch-girls, sacred white elephants, serial fairy
stories, and the rest were all worth studying; but I think the
_chefs-d'oeuvre_ of the two artistic centres were a peacock and
a multi-coloured dragon. The bird stood before a temple (on the mid
forearm), serenely conscious of its own perfection. Every feather on
its body was true to life, every spot on its tail a microscopic wonder.
The beast (or the creeping thing, if you so prefer to name it) twined
round one of his lower limbs, leaving the dent of its claws in the
flesh, and resting its squat, outstretched head on the centre of the
knee-cap. And so cunningly was the creature perched (as its owner
gleefully pointed out) that the least movement of his crural muscles
set the jagged backbone a-quivering, and the slobbering lips to mumble
and mow. Cospatric said that dragon was a most finished piece of
workmanship, and worth all he had cost.

"That's the worst of really good tattooing," he explained, _a propos_
of this beast; "it's so infernally expensive to get the best men.
You've no idea how they are run after. But luckily they've a soft place
for a real connoisseur, even though he comes from the West. And,
besides, I've got such a grand skin...."

Music and dinners absorbed his spare cash when such were available; but
out in Burmah and Japan neither were to his taste, and consequently all
ready funds were wont to be sunk in corporeal decoration.

Whether the outlay seems judicious I will not say. It was not my hide
that these uncanny limners operated upon.

Another of Cospatric's tastes was one I could chime in with more
readily. He did not flaunt it, by any means. On the contrary, he kept
the thing hidden, and I stumbled across it only by accident. Moreover,
it was a stroke of luck for me that I did so, as my want of knowledge
had been a bar to any intimacy; whereas, once in his confidence upon
this point, we got on together swimmingly, and I had a good time.

It was an unpremeditated return to the yacht late at night with news of
bear that helped the discovery. Ulus had brought the tidings just as I
was going to bed that his _bjorn_-ship was expected to call at a
nei